A few people I work with are tinkering with an off-the-shelf drone in our spare time and so we are writing a C# library to control it.
The way it works is you send UDP commands to the drone and you receive a stream of status & navigation UDP packets...

There is some language around async/await that I am going to stop using. I’ve heard others use it as well because it does help get the point across but I believe it is ultimately misleading. Async/await does not “release the thread.”...

When presenting, I like to demonstrate simple concepts in console apps because they don’t have any other baggage around them. This is a problem with async code though because you cannot have an async Main method. Entry point methods cannot be marked async...

Compose, compose, compose. Reuse, reuse, reuse. In the last post on cancellable “awaiting” on .NET events , I was so busy focusing on the wrapping the click event in order to get a smooth async control flow for the caller, I neglected to do the same inside...

My last couple of posts have been inspired by await-ing things (see Lucian’s list ) which allow you to use Tasks and the new C# async features to write synchronous looking expressive code around things that are not based on threads. There was one bit...

Lucian has an excellent series on turning things into Tasks so that you can can be compose them and await them. The Drag and Drop one caught my eye because it is a similar example to the common Reactive Extension demo of the same thing. Drag and Drop...

One of the common misconceptions I’ve encountered when developers first start using the Task Parallel Library is that they think Tasks are just fancy threads. This is easy to assume because in a common case, calling Task.Run(…), it actually does run the...

Visual Studio provides a bunch of good code snippets for creating boilerplate code. For example if you type “prop” you get this in intellisense
You’ll see a few nice property snippets.
prop – creates a basic automatic...

Helpful quick and dirty debugging tip: I never noticed this before, but if you send a large amount of text to MessageBox.Show() on Windows Phone, it doesn’t just truncate it. It allows you to scroll through it all. Very cool. Very unlike the desktop message...

Lets say I have a phone app (or any app really) that needs to make several web service calls at once. For example, imagine the user multiselects three items on a page and then taps the “add favorite” button. I then need to make three calls to the “set...

I got bitten by this not once but twice on Sunday as I hurriedly worked on a new phone app. Can you spot the difference between the the following two lines? Uri uri = new Uri( string .Format( " /View/DataView.xaml?collection={0}&id={1} "...

I have an app in the Windows Phone Marketplace which suddenly saw a spike in Little Watson email reports back to me last weekend. Each one looked like the last so I responded back to each user (always keep the user’s happy!) and went to investigate. The...

I recently had an ObservableCollection which did not currently contain the item I was interested in, but it would sometime in the near future. The questions is how best to get notified that the item is available so I could access its full property set...

Whenever I’m travelling I always have two freshly pinned tiles at the bottom of my start screen. Before I leave, I use my phone to look up the hotel I’m staying at and the location I’m visiting (like a customer’s address) and pin them both to the start...

I’ve gotten rather fond of using the Reactive Extensions for populating my data from the web in my Windows Phone applications. They provide a lot of flexibility and the code stays in a readable form. To demonstrate in a traditional MVVM model, let’s drop...

Just a quick tip for Windows Phone users regarding the onscreen keyboard. Most people I’ve talked to who complain about using an onscreen keyboard have a common issue. They are looking at what they type. This is their biggest mistake. When I first started...

From the App Hub’s news comes information on how to update your Windows Phone to Mango today in order to test those apps you have been building with on real hardware. The Windows Phone Developer team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of...

By default the Pivot Control on Windows Phone 7 simply displays a TextBlock as the title of the control. But what if you want to modify the title’s control template? Creating a default Windows Phone Pivot Application we see that the MainPage.xaml contains...

I’ve been using Reactive Extensions for .NET to attempt to wait until multiple async calls to load data are completed in order to perform some actions on all the data at once. Dev Tidbit of the Day Do not use ForkJoin with Event based observables. If...

Not the guidelines you must follow in order to pass the Marketplace ingestion process - these are the guidelines you should keep in mind and follow in order to make your app fit in well with the overall Windows Phone 7’s Metro UI. Jeff Wilcox’s “Metro...

No, unfortunately its not that update . It’s a small update designed to improve the software update process. Still, it is the first update for the phone and is paving the way for all the cut-n-paste & performance enhancing goodness of updates to come...

The new version of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit is available. Biggest things I want to highlight: PerformanceProgressBar built in (no more copying finding that older blog entry) TiltEffect for controls to match the phone’s Metro interface...

The Windows Phone 7 development articles are now published. They are aimed at guiding you through all the fundamentals of WP7 development, starting with “Hello World”. The topics are presented in a recommended order for newbies (like chapters of an intro...

In the last post I discussed how to create a custom page transition with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit that used your own local storyboard. That’s all well and good but there some nice changes we might like to see. Lets allow the storyboard...

Come and get it! The new developer tools include updated reference assemblies, a new version of the Windows Phone OS emulator image, and several minor bug fixes. This update also replaces the October 2010 update, including all of the fixes from that patch...